Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington Read Free Book Online Page B

Mussolini. Did Mussolini simply wake up one morning and decide to be bad? Surely not. Hitler must have made him that way, like Anne said.
    A shape appeared in front of my downcast eyes. I looked up, expecting to see Mr. Powell, ready to take me in for my flogging.
    “Hey there, Rocky.”
    It was Paul, dressed in tan slacks, a navy blazer, and a white shirt and tie. He was clean shaven, and his hair was neatly parted and combed behind his ears. I hadn’t seen him in a tie since he graduated from Macon. As far as I knew, he’d never combed his hair in his life.
    I was too elated by Paul’s sudden appearance at my moment of direst crisis to wonder how he had happened to arrive just when I was about to face Mr. Powell and Swift Justice. Paul must somehow have sensed my need, I assumed, and had come running to my aid.
    Ever ready to improvise, Paul behaved from the start as if he’d known he was going to find me there.
    “Hey there, Miss Hallenbeck,” he said.
    He leaned over the desk to give Miss Hallenbeck a peck. Her cheeks flushed pink. As it turned out, even the meanest woman in the Spottswood County Public School System was a sucker for Paul, the “born manipulator.”
    “So,” Paul said, “what has young Richard here gotten himself into?”
    “Fighting in the lunchroom,” Miss Hallenbeck said, casting a scowl in my direction. Paul sighed and shook his head.
    “Kids these days, right, Miss Hallenbeck?”
    She giggled girlishly.
    “Mrs. Askew didn’t mention she’d be sending you, Paul,” she said.
    “Something came up at the last minute,” Paul said. “I’m in town for an alumni thing, so I offered to help out.”
    A worried look came over Miss Hallenbeck’s face.
    “Mr. Powell will want to speak with Mrs. Askew,” she said. “Or your father.”
    “One of them will come in tomorrow,” Paul said. “They’ll call to set up an appointment later on, I’m sure.”
    “Well, all right,” Mrs. Hallenbeck said. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”
    She stood and started toward Powell’s office. Another loud slap pierced the air on the other side of the door.
    “If you don’t mind,” Paul said, “I’ll take the little pugilist here down to the bathroom to clean himself up.”
    “Make it fast,” she said.
    As we left the office, Paul winked at Miss Hallenbeck—not a quick, casual wink, but a slow, sensual, flirtatious batting of long, thick eyelashes. For a moment she seemed to lose her breath.
    “Come on, slugger,” Paul said.
    As we reached the end of the hallway, I turned toward the restroom. Paul touched my shoulder.
    “Not that way, brother,” he said.
    He tilted his head toward the entrance to the school, the tall glass doors glowing brightly in the midday sun.
    “What about Mr. Powell?” I said.
    “Have you ever had a taste of Swift Justice before, Rocky?” Paul asked.
    “No.”
    “I have,” he said. “Old Man Powell made me bleed when I was your age.”
    “He made you bleed?” I whispered.
    “That’s right,” Paul said.
    I heard another faint smack and another, louder cry. I envisioned the paddle in Mr. Powell’s thick, callused hand, slicing through the air, making me bleed. Who wouldn’t run away from that?
    We may well have passed Mom’s Buick station wagon on the way up the street, but I would have been hidden by the enormous dashboard of the Nova, gazing off to the right at the dogwood blossoms and the magnolia trees that spot the yards along the way to Pearsall’s Drugstore.
    “So,” Paul said, holding the wheel with one hand and lighting a Camel with the other. “What happened?”
    “You don’t know?” I said.
    “How would I?” he said.
    “I did what you told me to do,” I said. “I kicked him in the balls!”
    Smoke spewed from Paul’s mouth and billowed over his face as he choked with laughter.
    “Shit, Rocky,” he said. “What’d you do that for?”
    I felt myself start to cry again.
    “He said, ‘My dad says your dad is one cold-blooded